... Beckett, 'A world apart', in The Guardian (Weekend), 4 September 1999. 6 John Lloyd, New Statesman, 27 February 1998. 7 It was reported in the Sunday Telegraph 25 July 1999 that Blair tried to make Levy a Minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). This would have been a stunning coup by the Israelis but it was resisted by the Foreign Secretary, at the behest, presumably, of the traditionally pro-Arab FCO. Instead Levy became Blair's personal envoy to the Middle East- to no great effect thus far. 8 On Blair's dislike of Labour see Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, (London: Little Brown, 1998 ...

... tool is the Harvester Press' Radical Right and Patriotic Movements in Britain, a collection of microfiche records of the entire output of Monday Club, Aims of Industry, Bow Group etc. Benton writes thrillers- bad ones. One of his, A Single Monstrous Act (1976) spends most its time describing a revolutionary Trotskyist sect planning a coup in Britain (sic). This veneer of sophistication drops off at the end when the KGB is revealed to have been behind things all the time. This illustrates nicely the difficulty 'old hands' like Benson have with the independent radical left. What they'd like to believe is that Moscow is still behind it all. Bernard Nossiter: ...

... to leak just the incriminating material to the appalling Horatio Bottomley MP, for publication in his patriotic newspaper, John Bull. 'Flirting with treason'At much the same time as he was trying to frame Lansbury for treason, Churchill was himself coming close 'to flirting with treason'. Churchill appeared to endorse Sir Henry Wilson's fantasies about a military coup to overthrow Lloyd George and establish a government committed to a crusade against Bolshevism. While he backed away from Wilson's intrigues, what is significant is that he never squashed them which he was surely bound to do as Secretary of State for War. Stafford has some interesting things to say about Churchill in the late 1930s. He dispels the ...

... , in other words, appalling. The astrology training scheme dragged along slowly, and didn't show results until some years later when a seer we planted on President Nkrumah of Ghana persuaded him to accept an invitation to visit Communist China so that he would be out of the country when our boy, General 'Uncle Arthur' Ankrah, staged his coup d'etat, and some months later when a computer we programmed to make astrological computations induced President Sukarno of Indonesia to make various moves which suited our purposes. But the arrangement we made with Moral Rearmament gave us useful secret channels right into the minds of leaders not only in Africa and Asia but also in Europe. When Bob made similar ...

... It might also be understood as the intensification of a long-present sociological trend, identified by C Wright Mills in the late 1960s, for a 'power elite' to emerge in the now normal passage from government to consultancy to corporation and back again.' But then quickly afterwards they argue that the removal of the Gough Whitlam government in a 'constitutional coup' in Australia in 1975 led to commendable reform. Even their term 'legal authoritarianism' betrays a sort of mild shock-horror at the extent of the unfolding policies. Despite this, the book's main strengths – the tracking of the growth of the intelligence services to dominate policy budgets in recent years and transform 'social democrat' governments into authoritarian ones ...

... , an aberration that serves to affirm the essential stability of the liberal state and its political system. The state was, itself, already deeply incriminated in anti-Jewish discrimination and political parties had already experimented with a national chauvinism defined largely against the Jews." In the crisis of the 1970s the military rewrote their manuals on counter-insurgency and talked of coups they might run. In 1920 the Army had just finished three years of being responsible for "monitoring and managing industrial and revolutionary unrest in the UK". "From the close of 1917 to the start of 1920 it was the Army that was responsible for monitoring and managing 'industrial and revolutionary unrest in the United Kingdom'. The ...

... policy was distorted and transformed into a monster. It was indeed his intention to focus on the long-term strategic danger presented to the USA by the USSR. But his aims were limited and specific. He argued that the primary response of the USA to Soviet expansionism should be economic aid to countries where social and political conditions were favourable to pro-Communist coups. He was an advocate of covert operations, under political control. He maintained that the key to success in holding back the USSR was retention by the West of influence over the world's advanced industrial states which, should they fall under Soviet hegemony, would have the capacity to transform themselves into military powers strong enough to threaten the USA ...

... police vice squads may turn out to be true but he doesn't have the evidence. The temptation to make dramatic statements shows elsewhere. On p.262, of the Kennedy assassination, he writes: 'Meanwhile, General Walker, the far-right American Security Council (including General Lansdale and Air America Chairman Admiral Felix Stump) and Texas ultras started plotting their coup d'etat in Dallas.' He presents no evidence of this; nor is there any, to my knowledge. On p.431 he writes:'....the CIA imported Phoenix to America and called it Chaos.' But Operation Phoenix, about which Valentine has written a widely-praised book, involved identifying and assassinating supporters of the North Vietnamese ...